Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of important and confidential information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Maintaining and tracking the information, including replication and backup information, is often very important for a variety of reasons (e.g., recovery, corruption, correction, etc.).
Some traditional processing and storage approaches utilize virtual machines. A virtual machine typically involves “virtualization” or layers of abstraction in which various different hardware components are utilized to perform operations, wherein interactions at the virtual machine or higher level appear as interactions with a single machine or system. Virtual machines usually have a number of advantageous characteristics. For example, virtual machines usually facilitate instruction set architecture (ISA) independence from underlying hardware, relatively isolated coexistence of multiple operating system (OS) environments on the same system, and various application attributes (e.g., application provisioning, maintenance, recovery, etc.). However, traditional attempts at conventional virtual machine image backup replication often “consume” or “occupy” significant amounts of communication bandwidth and storage resources. The consumption or occupation of significant amounts of communication bandwidth and storage resources can have detrimental impacts on performance.